A. DENIAL OF BODILY AUTONOMY
Rapes and sexual assaults were commonplace on plantations, and the law afforded slave women no protection against such attacks. In her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes the feeling of utter helplessness that this lack of legal protection instilled in the victims of rape at the hands of their masters:
He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these things are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.
This sense that there [was] no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death is absolutely correct. Roberts explains that the law fostered the sexual exploitation of slave women by allowing white men to commit these assaults without impunity ....Owners had the right to use their property as they wished, so long as the abuse did not kill the chattel. Conversely, slave women had no recognizable interest in preserving their own bodily integrity.
